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Sleepless in Felton . . . sort of. Actually, while I load Blender on the laptop, I’ll weigh in during the quiet of a San Lorenzo Valley morning, complete with raccoons and skunks fighting in the near distance.

So while Blender goes through the motions — more on why I’m fiddling with this another time — I keep thinking about an article I read yesterday about how Linux is winning.

It’s an interesting perspective, worthy of discussion if one is so inspired. It is written from a corporate standpoint, so those of us at on the front lines of converting people to GNU/Linux may not relate directly. But still . . . at the moment, there aren’t any replies to the article. But chances are there will be.

While it doesn’t keep me up, there has been some rumblings about the fate of OpenSolaris, where finally a fork — or actually a “spork” — of OpenSolaris has manifested itself in the form of Illumos which is led by Nexenta.

Earlier this week, Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier asks the question, should OpenSolaris die? Zonker makes a compelling argument, complete with a heaping helping of history, for those working on OpenSolaris to come into the Linux fold, or failing that, at least to FreeBSD.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, but Zonker concludes toward the end of his blog with this: “It seems to me that it’d be a better world for software freedom and free *nix in general if the Solaris die-hards sucked it up and helped work on Linux. Failing that, FreeBSD. Either way, it’d be an improvement over trying to ‘spork’ OpenSolaris when the effort would be more effective elsewhere.”

Agreed.

My limited experience with OpenSolaris is trying to see if it would work on an old, trusty and ever-present Ultra 10 Sun box in the Redwood Digital office. But since Sun boxes account for even less, percentage-wise, than PowerPC Macs, not even OpenSolaris would make a version for them.

Forgetting your roots: Never a good sign.

Time to throw an old shoe out the door to break up the disagreement between nocturnal creatures.

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

A lot has been written so far about what to expect next year — some valid, some not.

But has that ever stopped me from joining the year-end pile-on? Perish the thought.

So here are 10 things to expect in 2009.

Or not.

Remember, objects may be closer than they appear, and your mileage may vary.

10. 2009 will be the year of Linux. But so will 2010, as well as 2011 and 2012. In fact, by 2013, the last pair of eyes on the planet will finally glaze over when a Linux writer proclaims the following year to be the year of Linux, and the more thoughtful pundits will just know that it’s now understood that the next year will be our year, for whatever reason, and they’ll write about something a tad more significant.

9. Fedora 11 will outshine Fedora 10. As hard as it may be to believe — and after a month I still can’t find a flaw with Fedora 10 — Fedora 11 will be an encore performance of what can best be described as a rock-solid distro, even for machines that go back a few years (in my case, a Dell 5000 Inspiron laptop and a Dell Optiplex desktop). Sadly, people will continue to be under the mistaken impression that Fedora is too “cutting edge” for anyone other than the most experienced superuser who might be too lazy to negotiate the Gentoo labyrinth (yes, that’s a gauntlet thrown at the feet of my Fedora colleagues to work next year on dispelling that stupid myth . . . ).

8. The UFC pits Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman against each other in a feature bout. What happens though is not one of those ridiculous near-death experiences for some poor troglodyte who normally gets suckered into the ring, but an epiphany for the entire FOSS community: Stallman and Torvalds meet at mid-ring and circle each other warily. Stallman opens the bout by saying maybe he was a little hasty in demanding GNU be stuck on the front of Linux, but Torvalds comes back with openly welcoming the option of joining the two names. Barriers between open source and free software dissolve. GNOME and KDE advocates embrace in a worldwide “kumbaya.” Planets align. Then I wake up.

7. Zenwalk increases the pace of its development. It becomes Zenrun, and in finding that they can add and release improvements to an already above-average distro at an even faster pace, they rename it Zenfly in 2010.

6. Lindependence comes to Redmond, Wash. The hall is rented, the fliers posted, and the riot police stand at the ready, but they remain wary since they don’t want to repeat the WTO fiasco in Seattle a decade ago. Nevertheless, yours truly — in a tribute to another overweight bald guy in the digital industry — opens the event with an insane onstage monkey dance that also brings him to within inches of a heart attack while Ken Starks unsuccessfully diverts the press’ attention. The Digital Tipping Point’s Christian Einfeldt, however, gets it all on video. Meanwhile, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu reps — along with others who choose to join Lindependence in 2009 — hand out live CDs and demonstrate their distros. Yes, that’s Red Hat’s “Truth Happens” video (click here for Quick Time fans) looping in the background all the while.

5. Mandriva gets in touch with its feminine side. This distro renames itself Womandriva and becomes a more reasonable, nurturing distro, finally dropping the adolescent Mandrake zeitgeist from its early days. The distro’s leadership also realizes what a huge mistake it was to let Adam Williamson go and rectifies that situation, adding a huge bonus to his salary.

4. The Madagascar Penguins join Tux as the Linux mascots. Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and the Private make Tux one of their own in their commando unit. Incidentally — this is true (you can look it up) — on the Madagascar DVD, the penguins provide their own commentary on their scenes. When Private is struggling to operate a computer while taking over the ship, Skipper comments, “What are you doing up there, playing Tetris? You told me you knew Linux, Private!” Just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave.

3. Windows 7 will be worse than Vista, as hard as that may be to believe. This development will result in yet another $30 million Microsoft ad campaign diverting attention from this latest offering. Realizing they picked the wrong Seinfeld character in their first campaign, the ad agency casts Jason Alexander with Bill Gates, making Gates look like the “cool one” in comparison.

2. Everyone joins the Ubuntu family. In an effort not to confuse brand new GNU/Linux users with the daunting tasks of trying to wrap their minds around 350 different distributions, distros give themselves new names: Fedbuntu, Debuntu, openBUNTU, Sabayuntu, Damn Small Buntu, CentBuntu, Dreambuntu, Slackbuntu, Pupbuntu, Mepbuntu, gNewBuntu, among others. Solbuntis and OpenSolbuntis also join the ranks.

1. Linux Foundation’s “I’m Linux” video contest’s winning entry grabs an Oscar. After Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ad campaign, and Microsoft following with a painfully original “I’m a PC” theme, the Linux Foundation garners thousands of entries in its “I’m Linux” video contest. The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences nominates the winner, which ends up awing those judging and the statuette for Best Short Film goes to the winner.

There are other developments, like the conflicts that the new OpenBSD Christian Edition causes, which may be addressed in a later blog.

Have a happy and prosperous new year.

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs HeliOS Solutions West in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)

Shameless self promotion: Okay, so Open Source Reporter has a store at Cafe Press and I made up some “Sue me first, Steve!” FOSS-wear at various prices — mostly T-shirts, but also some other items (no, I opted out from the thong underwear, unless the demand for “Sue me first, Steve!” underwear picks up . . . ). So help me out so I can print the magazine by buying something and send Darth Ballmer and Microsoft a message in the process.

Distro du jour: With two Indigo iMacs, the trusty Power Macintosh G3 minitower (with the Sonnet G4 upgrade) seems to be somewhat expendable these days. So . . . it now has Yellow Dog, but it doesn’t have to. I’m thinking about trying one more time to get Debian up and running on it (after all, I did take the time to burn 15 CD-ROMs — sheesh). But I keep hoping Fluxbuntu will have its PowerPC version up and running — a visit to their site had some PowerPC screen shots that were pretty impressive. All of which is to say, “watch this space.”

Here comes the Sun: Sun Microsystems brought its world tour to UC Santa Cruz this week, and on the whole it was pretty impressive. During the presentation about Sun’s open source offerings (the Java part was pretty interesting), they said that they were releasing one of their items under GPL v.2. I asked about whether they had planned to adopt v.3, but I ended up getting a very roundabout answer from the presenter — a member of the audience straightened both of us out, though.

(Larry Cafiero, editor/publisher of Open Source Reporter, is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)